Today I begin Life Work. We were up at four-fifteen this morning, and at six we drove to New London for a small ceremony: Jack Jensen died two years ago today (St. Patrick’s Day) and Jane organized a memorial at the marble bench erected in Jack’s memory outside his office at Colby-Sawyer College where he taught philosophy. I worked on a poem before we drove the twelve miles to stand in a circle, six of us, reading Scripture and praying. I was as cold as I have ever been; it occurred to me, in my egotism, that my suffering was appropriate to the anniversary. Do I think I will suffer Jack out of purgatory? Jack’s own theology mocks me. He was our minister, with a degree in philosophy to go with his divinity degree; often he was more philosophical than mystical and he never spoke of purgatory. Jane and I loved him, and his death two years ago was devastation.

We moved to New Hampshire in 1975, to undertake the life of free-lance writing, and to live in the farmhouse my great-grandparents bought in 1865. My grandmother was born here in 1878 and my mother in 1903. Our first Sunday in New Hampshire I thought: “They will expect us to go to church.” I suppose they were my cousins; church was the small white clapboard South Danbury Christian Church two miles north, which my great-grandparents Ben and Lucy Keneston helped to build in 1868, and where my grandmother played the organ seventy-eight years, from the age of fourteen until she was ninety-two, and where I sat on Sundays as a child when I visited my grandparents. For decades I had not gone to church, nor had Jane, and we went that first Sunday grudgingly, without enthusiasm, to hear the young man in the pulpit quote “the German poet Rilke”—which pricked up our poetical ears.

But there was something else, something that endures—a community radiating the willingness or even the desire to be careful and loving. This community was my cousin Edna, her sister Martha, our cousin Audrey, Annie Walker who played the organ following my grandmother, and other neighbors who assumed us into their rows as if we had just returned from a journey. The tender welcome was irresistible, and we went again the next Sunday and the next. One Sunday morning Jane was ill and stayed in bed; I would stay home with her—but five minutes before Church I knew I had to go, and sped off in the Plymouth, astonished at my desire.